Getech Group (LSE:GTC) — Interim Results Presentation 2022

0:01 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the GETECH GROUP PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Type in your questions at any time and press end. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, company view all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. You'll see in front of you a poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. And I'd now like to hand over to

0:33 Jonathan Kopas, CEO. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending this morning's presentation. I'm joined so I'm I'm Jonathan Kopas, GETECH's CEO. I am joined by Andrew Derbyshire, GETECH's CFO, and Luke Johnson, who is the MD of h two Green. And h two Green is GETECH's hydrogen development business. In today's presentation, we will follow a format where we will give an overview of the company. We will go through some of the financials from the first half. We've just reported our interim results. We'll also cover the operations of the group, give an update there, and then, of course, we'll move on to q and a as well.

1:23 So first of all, bit of an overview of us as a business. So GETECH is an organization with a strong foundation. We have industry leading geoscience data, and we also have proprietary geospatial software. And we've developed this principally for the oil and gas industry. And we have, not only built, our expertise in energy through those relationships, but we're also a trusted partner, of many, global oil and gas companies. And this strong foundation opens for us recurring revenue. We, have built an order book, which currently stands at a record level, and we also have a strong balance sheet. Now in March 2021, we raised £6,250,000, and we've used those proceeds to diversify the application of our products and services into a number of focus sectors that are driving the energy transition.

2:18 And what we've seen in the first half is that demand across those new diversification sectors has been strong for our products and our expertise. And in fact, that foundation business, developed delivered a net cash inflow in the first half, which Andrew will will tell you a bit more about. This diversification is also opening something extremely exciting, for our shareholders as well, which is the potential to deliver a value transformation. And we're doing this, through not only just diversifying our products and services, but also building a portfolio of low carbon asset investments. And we have an ambition to establish at least 500 megawatts of geo energy and green hydrogen, assets by 2030.

3:04 In the first half, our hydrogen projects have expanded in in tangibility, scale, and scope. And we're also, growing our pipeline of growth, not just in hydrogen, but also in geothermal, and critical minerals as well.

3:20 So what's our strategy? Well, our strategy is to apply our world class geoscience data, our unique geospatial software, and our leading expertise to accelerate the energy transition. And we're doing that by locating, developing, and operating geo energy and green hydrogen projects. On this slide, we detail our four focus sectors. The first of those is transitional petroleum, where we are identifying the highest value hydrocarbons with the lowest carbon footprint, and we're integrating with those carbon storage solutions to make them a sustainable part of the energy transition. In green hydrogen, we're developing our own network of green hydrogen and ammonia hubs. In critical minerals, we are analyzing the location and economic concentration of critical minerals.

4:07 And in geothermal, we are working to identify and develop geothermal heat and power projects.

4:17 We talk about a business model, which revolves around three things, locate, develop, operate. And in that first part of our our business model, locate, we are working to locate energy and natural resource assets. We also work to locate energy needs as well. And in doing this, we are using our unique IP, our products, our technologies, and our skills, and this allows us to build this trusted partner status. The next part of our business model is And this is where we are taking that trusted partner status and we're using it to build strategic partnerships. And from those strategic partnerships, we're building our own portfolio of development assets. And we're always really focused on repeatable and scalable opportunities, and our focus is is global. We're really looking here to deliver transformative value to to our shareholders.

5:09 And then the final part is we see a role for ourselves in the operational stage of the life of these assets. Now that

5:15 stage, we believe that we will have a minority interest, and we will be receiving our share of the revenue and profit, and also a management fee. And that opens up another source of exciting recurring revenue. And I think what really is is fundamentally so, sort of exciting about this proposition is that we are doing this in an environment where there are really strong industry growth drivers. When we raised money eighteen months ago, our focus was on how we could accelerate the path towards sustainable decarbonization. Now hand in hand with that, we've seen a lot of progress in terms of governments, with with policy initiatives and also governments unlocking large amounts of investment into these low carbon sectors.

6:01 Now in the last twelve months, we've also seen the tragic events in Ukraine, which have put energy security firmly on the map. And that combination of the need for energy and natural resource security, the drive for sustainability has led to governments, you know, doubling down on policy and investment, and we'll we'll talk a little bit about that later in this presentation. And the reason why we're doing this is that we're always focused on enhancing the value of what we do. From our foundation business, the products and services, we're delivering steady revenue growth and the cash profitability of that business is very strongly scalable.

6:40 Alongside that, our asset portfolio is starting to build transformational value growth, and we target first revenues from those asset portfolio in 2025. I'd like now now like to just pass over to Andrew, who will walk us through the financials. Andrew, over to you. Thanks, Jonathan. Just firstly, just giving an overview of the first half results. We have strong revenue growth. Revenue was up to 2,700,000. That's an 11% year on year growth from the same period last year. And supporting this, we've also now have a record order book figure of 4,800,000.

7:29 And this is, in fact, a 118 percent higher than the figure same time last year. Our cost base through this investment period has increased to 3,700,000, and this is largely building out our asset development team. That's the increase in costs there. At the end of the period, we have a strong balance sheet with 4,300,000 in cash at the end of the period. And in addition to this, shortly after the period end, we raised another 2,400,000 of invoices, which will be paid during the second half of the year.

8:09 Just going into a bit more detail on the order book here. You can see from the chart on the right that we've really broken out to the range from previous years. And also just to help people understand the order book a little bit more, we've we've given a breakdown this year in how we expect the order book to convert into revenue. So you can see from the chart and the bullets on the left that it's roughly a third converting to revenue in the second half of this year, a further third in 2023, and the remaining third beyond 2023. In addition to this, in July, our annualized recurring revenue also increased up to 2,400,000. So that's ahead of where we were at the half year and also at the end of twenty twenty one we were 2,400,000.

9:08 Net cash outflow this year was 1,600,000. And on the top right hand chart here, I'll give a breakdown of that cash movement. And one important point to point out here is that 700,000 of the cash outflow was timing differences relating to invoicing in the period, which we expect to unwind. We've also, for the first time, given a bit more detail about our operating cash flows here. So we've broken out the costs that we've incurred in the first half from our asset development team, which is GBP 1,100,000. So if you add back these costs, you can see the underlying foundation business actually generated operating cash flows of GBP 900,000 in the first half.

10:00 And when you consider that net of the capitalized costs in the period, it actually generated free cash flow of £300,000 The 1,100,000 of asset development costs that we're building out of our hydrogen and geothermal asset teams. And these costs are expensed during the period and will be until we reach a final investment decision. We're forecasting first revenues from asset development in 2025. On this slide, I have just gone into a bit more detail on our cost base. So on the left hand side, this is our total cost base of the business and as I mentioned earlier, this has increased to 3,700,000.

10:48 But the pie chart you can see in the breakdown that the focus of our costs has switched from predominantly being in petroleum to being a more diversified cost across all sectors: petroleum, geothermal, strategic minerals and hydrogen. On the right hand side, the table just gives a breakdown of our investment spend, so a subset of our total costs and where we're putting money to invest in growth in business. And you can see the real change between 2020 and where we expect to be at the end of twenty twenty two with a significant

11:32 reduction in investment in petroleum and significant increases in hydrogen as well as the other sectors. Great. Thanks very much, Andrew. So now we move into the next part of the presentation, which is talking about our operations and talking about how we are putting our strategy into action.

11:58 So within our locate business, we are we are leveraging proven offering. And what that means is it take it's about taking the geoscience data, the geospatial software, and the leading expertise, which we originally developed for the petroleum sector and transferring it into our focus markets of carbon storage, critical minerals, geothermal, and hydrogen. And in the first half of this year, I think what we've seen here is a really successful transfer of value. In transitional petroleum, of course, heightened energy security has, you you know, has been a very, very strong reminder of the role that petroleum will play in the energy transition.

12:44 And what we've seen is we've seen high customer retention rates, both across Globe and our software. And we've also won new customers. And we put out recently an RNS about a $1,100,000 multiyear contract with an international major, which illustrates that point. Now alongside our transitional petroleum work, we're also building our carbon storage offering. And we're very proud to be helping the North Sea Transition Authority to shape and promote The UK's first carbon storage licensing round. And this is the first commercial application of GETECH software in the carbon storage market. And to give you an idea about what the kind of potential growth in that market

13:26 is, the International Energy Agency is forecasting 20 fold growth in carbon capture and storage investment in just the next three years. This is a really important market for ensuring sustainability of petroleum as we move through the energy transition.

13:47 Moving to Critical Minerals, we have customers now who are using our solutions to identify copper, gold, and lithium, and they're doing that in Australia, Canada, and The US. We also in the period announced a £900,000 contract with a global mining company, and that's the largest critical minerals contract that GETECH has signed in its history.

14:09 Again, putting that into the context of the growth markets, copper, which is a metal that is essential to pretty much all aspects of electrification. The forecast is that we need 36% growth in copper demand by 2030 to meet global electrification targets. We also see the potential to expand value across multiple new minerals, leveraging our data and our exploration workflows. In geothermal energy, we're ramping up our service work in Europe and North America. And we're also leveraging our Heatseeker product. And Heatseeker is a product which we developed last year, and we're using it to unlock asset opportunities in geothermal. Forecasts are for the geothermal market to to expect to to double by 2027.

14:59 So there's lots of growth running room here. And there's also we're identifying a really interesting opportunity to bring our critical minerals work and our geothermal work together. We're exploring lithium extraction from geothermal brines, and that offers a very exciting, front of potential to unlock, additional value, for our for our shareholders. Next, I'm gonna hand over to Luke, and Luke will walk you through our hydrogen activities and the progress we've made in h one. Luke, over to you. Thank you, Jonathan.

15:35 I think we're we're all pretty aware at the moment just how important hydrogen is is becoming in the path towards net zero. I'm not quite sure I would go with the The UK's government silver bullet analogy, but it's getting pretty close to how important this is going to be. What we're seeing around the hydrogen, back to Jonathan's earlier themes of sustainability policy, investment, and energy security. On the sustainability side, we are seeing an expansion in the transport use cases. We're seeing more rail projects getting pushed forward. We're actually seeing quite a rise in in light goods vehicles when we originally targeted heavy goods vehicles and those commercial fleets that need to keep moving. And in certain regions, we're seeing a a growth in the the potential for the passenger market as well for the home home user, particularly in those environments where you have long travel distances and and challenging terrain to to navigate.

16:35 What we're seeing is that throughout this journey, the economics have been improving. We're seeing the point towards where we can drive hydrogen to a cost of production that will reach diesel parity, which really unlocks a lot of the market switching over. And so what we're seeing with that that journey is an increased appetite amongst the customer base. Around the policy and investment, as Jonathan mentioned, the the nations around the world are are really getting after this. There's over 30 nations now that have a a hydrogen policy or hydrogen strategy in place. The UK this year doubled its targets from five gigawatts to 10 gigawatts with a a target of half of that being from green hydrogen production.

17:21 And that's led to the opening of the net zero hydrogen fund, which provides both CapEx and OpEx support as well as the ability to fund some of the early development expenses that we that we incur as a developer. The EU is even more ambitious with a 40 gigawatt target by 2030. And to achieve this, they've created quite a lot of initiatives to try to drive investment into the EU and also support in importation such as the the £3,000,000,000 euro hydrogen bank that will help us progress and exploit some of that market. The reality of that geopolitical unrest is probably the driver behind some of that push for the EU to to try to diversify away from natural gas.

18:09 It's unfortunate that that is is one of the points of driver, but we're very well positioned to be able to supply that hydrogen. And we're seeing an opportunity, particularly in Germany, where there is now a funding gap provided for the importation of green hydrogen. And that specifically allows us to offset any increased cost for green hydrogen production at the point of delivery relative to applications where they're currently buying gray hydrogen. And so that means that from a customer's point of view, they are able to purchase a a green product without any increased cost. We believe the secret to success in hydrogen really comes back to this concept of of understanding where to locate the these development opportunities.

18:56 Unlike traditional fuel vectors, we can produce the hydrogen wherever we have a power point and a water or water source. The challenge, though, is determining where the overlap of land demand and power allows us to find the optimum economic developments. And so we're using our data led approach and and really unique geospatial capabilities to help us understand and quantify how we can identify cost competitive commercially viable developments. So we start off with this with this Venn diagram to look for opportunities where we can find the suitable sites. For example, we typically look for brownfield industrial locations where we have easy access to planning support as well as a a plethora of of industrial customers there that typically lend to favorable cost per acre for that land site.

19:50 The demand is is can be clearly mapped, and and we we work very hard on trying to understand where these demand centers will grow, particularly focusing on where we see the hydrogen value proposition to be asymmetrically positive. We're not advocates to say that battery electric is is never going to be suitable or hydrogen is the only answer. What we do is we recognize that it will work particularly well in certain circumstances, and we focus on finding those before the market really has identified it. That has opened a lot of collab collaborations with partners because that that discussion with the data backing really helps them understand why they want to invest and push forward into the hydrogen space. And the other component is that from a operational point of view, the price of electricity dominates the price that hydrogen will carry through.

20:44 We will run these sites as a margin based business very much like oil and gas is is a margin based business that you you put a margin imposed upon the price of oil at the barrel. And so with that, we can pass that through without becoming an energy trader ourselves. But wherever possible, we want to lower the cost of that to increase our comp cost competitiveness in the delivery of that hydrogen. And we've been very proud to identify quite a lot of opportunities for development of of on-site wind and solar generation that coincide with some of the developments that we're looking at doing. And finally, whilst there are a lot of hydrogen developers out there that are interested in doing a a islanded connection to a single renewable source, we, with a industrial background behind ourselves, are focused on locations that still have access to that greater grid connectivity so that we can deliver that security and supply to our customer base by having the availability to generate that power the sorry, generate the hydrogen when it's needed.

21:48 What it also offers us is the ability to work within some of the demand side market, which is a growing market in the in the energy space, allowing us to look for ways to monetize some of the flexibility we can offer in our production. One thing that we've done is really focus on a a really rigorous portfolio development. And this leads us to quite a lot of work internally to make sure that we're bringing the right projects through and that we're developing the right opportunities in the right way. We have unashamedly stolen this from our history in oil and gas. This is the same process that I used to use in Chevron and some of my colleagues in GETECH used to use in Shell. It's a proven methodical but but accurate way of us to develop assets.

22:38 So what this is, in essence, is that we focus at the beginning, and this is really where I spend a lot of my time in identifying new opportunities. So we're going out and investigating, finding those locations where we think hydrogen's going to offer a particular advantage to our customer base. Once we've done that and assessed that with some of our geospatial work, we bring that to the engineering team who go through a phase of assessing the opportunity and understanding what are the possible engineering solutions that we can do. This issue you can see as an expansion phase in the activity is really crucial to make sure that we don't rush to a poorly defined engineering solution when we assess all of the right opportunities so that we're at the stage when we can then execute a project based upon engineering solutions that will work, that will deliver the hydrogen as promised and at a cost competitive position.

23:31 From that stage onward, we move through a process that we call a decision review board. At each of the gaps in between these diagrams here, there is a independent audit by the senior leadership and the team that make sure that that my project team have addressed all of the challenges and that we haven't missed anything. That process allows us then to move forward and unlock more capital for us to increase the the focus and effort that we're doing. And so during the select phase, we'll run a small number of opportunities through a prefeed or prefront end engineering design process to further refine our understanding of the opportunity before entering the final DRV sorry, entering the final choice during the defined phase where we're going to complete the front end engineering design and head towards FID.

24:20 For Shoreham and Inverness, we're looking at FID in in the second half of twenty twenty three to the first half of twenty twenty four, and that will then lead us into a procurement process and then installation before final commissioning with first production expected to be in 2025. Just a bit of an update on the two major projects that are in the market at the moment. We're gonna spread across the country from Shoreham in the very South to Inverness in the North. Shoreham has been a fantastic cornerstone project for ourselves. It is a port, one of the top in the top third of the ports in The UK and a very captive market for ourselves with over 800 HGV movements in and out of that port daily. One thing about this is that the port doesn't have any HGV refueling facilities.

25:11 And so at the moment, the customer base are refilling on route even though most of the trucks are back to base operations. This means that from a customer point of view, we're gonna have a very favorable journey towards securing a big part of that market as we as we deliver hydrogen and have the ability to change the customer's buying behaviors. At Shore Import, and you can see in the image in the background through here, we have the opportunity to develop renewables. We have been favorably received with some of the proposals with the local council and the planning authorities for developing additional onshore wind as well as rooftop solar. That additional onshore wind and solar, we have exclusivity for all of those developments at the port, which we've recently announced has been further extended another five years well beyond that FID and and first production concept as presented before.

26:03 Adding our own renewables offers the ability to to dramatically lower our operational expense, as mentioned before, and give us a lot more confidence over exactly what our levelized cost of energy is, which then carries forward to the customer conversations around the levelized cost of hydrogen that we can afford them to to sell them. We're now entering that prefeed as mentioned. We have completed a very detailed feasibility study. That feasibility study not only looked at the commercial and the customer relationships, but also the the engineering reality of the port. The two hundred and sixty year history, there are lots of opportunities and sites that we could be using, but we needed to have the right overlap of that land, demand, and power for us to then enter the engineering. I'm pleased to say we're we're kicking off that pre FEED now.

26:49 In the North in Inverness, one thing that we've discovered up in the in the Highlands in particular is that there is a very strong customer pool for hydrogen. That mountainous cold climate is proving quite unsuitable for battery electric. And what we're finding is that there is additional growth beyond what we expected in those light goods vehicles, particularly commercial vehicles that need to be on the road on a routine basis, but also some of the passenger fleets. We're also have a fantastic opportunity to secure a major anchor customer in rail demand. Our site at Inverness with SGN is a a former gas holder site now complete in the demolition or soon to be completed. And and that allows us to have a location directly adjacent to the railhead where we can provide that fuel directly to the to those incoming trains. So that ideal concentration of land and demand has provided that opportunity for us.

27:49 But I think probably the most exciting component is how Inverness becomes that cornerstone for our network development across here. Jonathan and I were up in The Highlands talking about the the opportunity to extend that Inverness region into a a regional network, and the council in the area have been ecstatic with that concept and engaged with us on an MOU. We're currently under discussions to enter a j joint venture agreement with them whereby they can assist us in extending that network, encouraging customer base, and and making availability for planning and capital. We would create with that one of the first regional networks in The UK, a real microcosm to test bed how hydrogen can impact an economy, and that has really driven a lot of attention towards this project.

28:43 Over the last six months, we have seen, however, a significant expansion beyond our initial designs in terms of the hydrogen tangibility, both in scope and scale. When we began this project, we expected to see some of this demand to emerge later in time. But in in fact, we've already received letters of intent, expressions of interest, and pledge commitments for over three tons a day of offtake aligning with project startup. Now that's the combined over the Inverness and the Shoreham locations. And we don't necessarily expect every commitment there to convert on day one, but it is a very strong commitment and indication that the market is is pulling towards a hydrogen solution. Those same customers have forecast their growth, which we expect to reach to about five and a half tons a day over time.

29:33 And beyond that, we're seeing additional qualified demand within the area already of an additional two tons a day. And this has been really quite fast by comparison to what we expected. This has then led us on to really achieving some some great milestones in terms of the projects. We've extended that exclusivity at Shoreham Port for additional five years. That takes us through FEED and the installation and and execution of the projects and in the first years of production. So we will have that locked captive audience there for ourselves at Shoreham Port, which is fantastic. We continue to support their developments. We were at Shoreham Port Sustainability last week, and we had tremendous support there from the local community and stakeholders. We also announced earlier in the year that the first groundworks have begun in Inverness.

30:23 SGN began with the demolition of their of their gas holder facility, a a default legacy asset of the of the town gas era. And that has prepared the ground for us to now move forward and and get ready for investing in that in that rail focused asset. And then moving forward, what has that done for us? Well, it's increased our phase one capacity. We have added in wind and solar about 13 megawatts of wind and about 1.6 megawatts of solar, both in Inverness and in Shoreham, which creates an exciting new revenue stream for us. One of the things we have discovered is that it's been a lot easier to get these these these project development concepts supported by the local community because it's part of an integrated hydrogen hub.

31:16 And so we're very excited about what this could lead to in potential for us to to continue to expand our reach in the in the net zero ambition. We've also had to increase on the basis of that demand growth our initial concept for what phase one would look like from 800 kilograms a day to two and a half tonnes at day one of capacity. So that's obviously a dramatic increase in the amount of hydrogen and early stage revenue that we're expecting to generate from these projects. The total capital I'm sorry. The total project that that that's available hasn't necessarily changed. Our our analysis of the market potential remains consistent with with what we're seeing, but what we're seeing is that rapid adoption and and that pull forward in the market space.

32:03 And behind that, and this is, I guess, the the busy feet under the water that you don't see when the the swan slides gracefully past, but we have been very busy working on that hydrogen pipeline behind the scenes. We've mentioned and spoken a little bit about the Highland network, and there's a lot of activities there to expand that Inverness site into a regional hub, and I'll be excited to to share more information about that when the the time is right. And we can talk a little bit more about how those that network might develop. But we've also been seeing from our engagements at Shoreham Port and and our community engagements in the area such a positive reception to what we're trying to achieve at the port, both in terms of the community, the regional area, but also then replicating that that development into other ports around the country and internationally.

32:56 And this has allowed us to open the doors to conversations that I think will yield significant fruit over time. And for us at the moment, it's a matter of of moving those forward into a position where we can make announcements around it. Some things that we have spoken about is how we've extended our capability into the Dutch and German markets. Jonathan told me this looks a bit like dad's army. Apologies for that. No reference intended. But nonetheless, we are moving on to the continent and and landing at the beachheads. We have dedicated professionals in in Holland and now in Germany, sitting in Berlin, particularly, a hydrogen focused business development person who's helping us understand both local market opportunities, but also the opportunities for us to potentially create import import projects where we could be delivering hydrogen to that enormous German market.

33:51 And we'll be looking to make more news about that as we go. But in total, the the amount of projects that we have in the pipeline that are at earlier stages and in addition to the stages that we've mentioned with Shoreham and Inverness, we now have about 240 megawatts of of projects in the pipeline with a focus on transport, but we are exploring growth opportunities in industrial and export markets as well that I think are going to be transformational. Jonathan, I'll hand back to you, if you don't mind. Great. Thanks very much. Thanks very much, Luke. So in terms of outlook and summary, you know, we've talked about a market which has very strong demand drivers. We feel that we are we have the right business model for the right moment as the world is trying to address energy security and the energy transition and decarbonization.

34:46 The revenue and order book momentum that we saw in h one has extended into the second half of this year. Luke's also just been describing the growth that we're seeing through green hydrogen, and, you know, that revolves around the the tangibility of these projects, the scale of them, and and and the scope also. And our asset development pipeline, as you've just been hearing, is growing in hydrogen. But in the interims, we also talk about these exciting opportunities in in geothermal and critical minerals and opportunities that bridge geothermal and critical minerals, such as the, lithium extraction from, geothermal brines. The focus for us, as we look across our organization is to drive sustained foundation profitability from our products and services, and also to then be building towards that asset driven, step change.

35:40 We're building, tangibility into those, those those projects, Shoreham and Inverness being, the ones in the public domain, the pipeline that sits behind. And we're closing in on that first hydrogen date of 2025. And then, of course, more broadly than that, you know, our approach is portfolio based, and our ambition is to establish at least 500 megawatts of new geo energy and green hydrogen assets by 2030. And key to that is our ability to unlock strategic partnerships by deploying that foundation offering of data and analytics. So thanks very much for your time this through this presentation. We're now gonna have some time for q and a. That's That's brilliant, Jonathan. Yes, let me just jump in there just to give you a short pause before we as you say, we go into Q and A. And thank you to all of you for your presentation this morning.

36:37 Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just want the company just take a few moments to review those questions you've submitted already today. I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via your investment company dashboard. Now you did, receive a number of questions through, today's presentation, so thank you to everybody for your engagement this morning. If I may, Jonathan, can I just hand back to you to read out the questions and and give a response as where it's appropriate to do so? And I'll pick up from you at the end. Sure. Great. Thanks very much. So the first question here is a question about our foundation operations. And the question is, do you need to increase capacity within GETECH to deliver on the strong order book?

37:22 For example, new staff, etcetera, or can this be delivered through existing resources? I I think the thing to remember about the foundation book is about 80% of the foundation business is about 80% of our revenues today come from products. And our product model model is to build something once and sell it many times. And so that means that, you know, we can strongly scale our our revenues and and without a significant expansion in, you know, costs in that foundation that that foundation business. So we're well positioned to convert that order book in into revenue. There's a follow on to that, which is also saying, well, how many employees do you have in the company and where are they mainly based?

38:09 Are they mainly based in The UK? So we are an organization. We have risen from about 60 people to about just under 70 people across the last twelve months. And what's interesting is that we're becoming more geographically distributed, and we're also adding some really important resources in both business development and also in in in communication as well. So we have our you know, many of my technical team, particularly on the geoscience side, are based out of Leeds. The hydrogen team is based out of Edinburgh, but we've been adding some really exciting business development resources more broadly. So my head of business development, Max Browers, works out of out of Holland.

38:58 Max previously was the head of energy transition for Shell Global Exploration. So, you know, you know, an important member of the team. We've also added to Max's team with the hydrogen specialists that Luke mentioned, who is based out of Germany, and we also have a geothermal specialist now who is based out of out of France. So what we're really doing here is we're adding key expertise in the right geographies. We also have had, of course, a we have a US entity. And given the fact that a number of our customers have been US based, we have a sales capability as well as some technical capability there. So we have, like, a really good spread of people.

39:48 And those people are working across all of these sectors that we're expanding into. And this is this key point, which is that things we develop in petroleum, we're transferring into these new sectors. And that's really, you know, utilizing the team. And, you know, we can see in h one how that's converting into value. There's a question here about dividends. You know, what are our thoughts regarding dividends moving forward? Well, GETECH has been a dividend paying company in the past. We are in an investment and growth phase. And so certainly, from the company and board's point of view, you know, our focus at the moment is making our precious resources work as hard as possible to be delivering this transformational step in value. And when I talk about resources, I mean, two things really. I mean, our people's time and their skills and also the capital.

40:45 And, of course, we are the custodians of, you know, value for that in terms of shareholder capital. So, you know, that's where our focus is. We'll keep that dividend policy, under review, but at the moment, it's about investing for growth. Question here for you, Luke. For green hydrogen projects, how do you see in Shoreham and Inverness sorry. What milestones do you see in terms of outlook for Shoreham and Inverness over the next six months? And can you say a little bit more about the plan to introduce wind to Inverness as well? Certainly, Jonathan. So we're entering a very exciting phase in the in the engineering works now. So we begin prefeed what we have begun prefeed work on both of those projects.

41:38 We're expecting to complete that towards the end of the year to the beginning of next year, at which point we'll have another point of of retro retrospection to make sure that we're prepared to move forward with the preferred case. And then we'd expect to see six to eight months of of that front end engineering and design coming through on that on those projects, leading us towards an FID in in sometime in h two twenty twenty three. There are other aspects that we expect to be talking about over the coming months. You know, we have been speaking about the the joint venture agreement that we've been negotiating with the Highlands Council. Hope to be able to make news about that when the time is right. And there's obviously a lot of activity that we're doing around some of the the net zero hydrogen fund, various other grant supports that that we're looking at at engaging with, and we hope to be able to talk a little bit more about those.

42:37 And, you know, somewhere along this journey, we'll be starting to talk more about other assets, not just not just the two Cornerstone ones. So within the next six months, I I would expect to to be able to to talk more broadly about how some of that pipeline has developed. With regards to wind, interestingly enough, both Shoreham and Inverness have got fantastic aspects for wind power generation. In Inverness, we were shown a tremendous vote of support, Jonathan, when we first met with the council to support that wind because it's associated with a green hydrogen hub, and they recognize how much that is transformative to the value creation that we can achieve with the hydrogen projects, but also how it helps unlock a a great opportunity for them to to benefit from that emergent hydrogen economy.

43:32 So we would expect to replicate something fairly similar to what we're what we're looking at doing in Shoreham. That brings a lot of economies of scale for ourselves. It's a very, very commoditized type installation and a lot of experienced partners that are available and interested in coming in and and helping us in some of that development. Great. Thanks very much, Luke. Another question here. And the question is for green hydrogen projects, how do you evaluate the cost of funding, and in particular, the value left to GETECH shareholders? So I think there's a few things I'd say about that. You know, Luke has spoken about the work that we're doing and the progress we've made in the first half in terms of maximizing the value of these projects, you know, making sure we have robust engineering, you know, you know, as much early demand as we can possibly be putting together.

44:33 And underneath all of that is the application of the geospatial analytics, which is saying, well, let's find the right places to be deploying capital as well. And so that's one part of the equation. It's about just making sure these are the most robust and valuable projects that we can take forward. Now the other part of this is that as we're building out this asset portfolio, we're, of course, building a capital structure around these assets. And we've talked a little about that in the past. We've talked about these being financed at the asset level. And of course, as we're building that capital structure, we are looking to secure the lowest cost of capital for us as an organization and for our shareholders in terms of, you know, taking forward those developments.

45:19 I think stepping back from that, you know, if we look at this landscape of of hydrogen, there quite honestly aren't that many hydrogen developers. Now balanced against that is a very significant pool of capital, which is looking to deploy to be deployed into hydrogen. You know, people are excited. They're excited about, you know, the backing that this is receiving in terms of, you know, government the government engagement. They're excited about the fundamental role that hydrogen plays in in in decarbonization. But what I think those investors are finding is is that there aren't that many tangible hydrogen projects for them to start deploying capital into. And so the progress we're making across the portfolio and, you know, the the the the steps that we're seeing in places like, you know, Shoreham and Inverness, you know, Shoreham where the progress we made has been rewarded with five years of exclusivity.

46:18 You know, they are building tangibility that makes our projects stand out in that financing market. And so today, as we're building that capital structure, you know, we're seeing very strong engagement from the funding counterparties, which we've talked about in previous presentations. And and those include, you know, strategic partners, and those are both operational partners and financing partners. With contracted hydrogen, there's the potential to debt finance these projects, and we're seeing engagement from both, you know, banks for one of the better words, know, the sort of high street names and beyond. And also, of course, vendor finance markets, people who are partnering on the technology side that could unlock capital as well.

47:04 And Luke also touched on government grants as well. And that government grant money is is is flowing into the sector all the way through from development expenditures through operating costs and capital costs as well. And and we're participating in those processes. So, you know, there's a lot going on in terms of building that capital structure. Every decision we make on that path is about thinking about, you know, maintaining and maximizing our shareholders' exposure to the value of of these projects. And as we progress Shoreham and Inverness and build out the wider portfolio, I think that only makes it more exciting because it means, you know, we we move into the, you know, the the the scale of that capital deployment, which people are looking, you know, to to do across this space.

47:54 So so, you know, we'll obviously keep everyone updated as we move through those steps. But, you know, I think it's a very you know, the hydrogen environment only gets stronger and more exciting. But I could also say the same thing about our other, you know, target sectors as well, like geothermal and critical minerals. And I think, you know, these are, you know, core areas all core areas of focus for us. We see a lot of exciting growth opportunity from the foundation business all the way through the asset organization as well. That's great. Jonathan, Luke, Andrew, I think you've addressed all the questions from investors. And, of course, if any further questions do come through, we'll make those available to you after today's meeting. Jonathan, I know in in feedback is particularly important to the company, and I'll shortly redirect those on the call to give you their thoughts and expectations. But I wondered if I may, before doing so, just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, and then I'll send investors to give you their feedback.

48:50 Thanks very much. Well, first of all, thanks very much, everyone, for your time. You know, when we spoke last time, I think it was about, you know, talking about the deployment of capital into our business across these focus sectors. H one, I think there's, you know, strong demonstrations of the engagements we're receiving from customers, the way we're leveraging that into transformational asset opportunities. And I think that, you know, that in itself is exciting, but I think the context of our organization and our, you know, commercial activities makes it even more exciting. You know, we have the right business model for the right time for this energy transition. You know, we are addressing that path towards sustainable decarbonization. We are also addressing the, you know, the challenges of, you know, energy and natural resource security as well. And so when I think about the world, there's clearly a lot of volatility out there.

49:50 You know, there's a lot of debate about the cost of living crisis, but what we do contributes to the solution to those challenges. And that's why, you know, GETECH is well positioned and so relevant to the world that we live in. And I very much look forward and, you know, alongside with my colleagues to be giving you further updates on the progress we make over the coming weeks and months. So thanks for the time, and we look forward to talking to you again soon. That's great. Jonathan, Luke, Andrew, thank you once again for your time this morning and for updating investors. Can I please ask investors on the call not to close this session as we're now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback and all the company can better understand your views and expectations? This might take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly funded by the company. On behalf of management team at GETECH GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good morning to you all.